Sisi Courts Investors: Stability Key to Africa Returns

Stability was the pitch, and capital was the audience. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told delegates at the Alamein Africa Forum on Saturday that economic development cannot take root in unstable countries, and that security is precisely what investors, manufacturers and farmers require to operate.

“Stability is not a luxury but a fundamental pillar sought by investors, manufacturers and farmers so they can operate in a safe environment,” Sisi said in his opening speech at the forum, which opened Friday in New Alamein on Egypt’s northern coast. Across the continent, he argued, security begins with supporting the national state and its institutions, respecting unity and sovereignty, prioritizing peaceful solutions to conflicts, and upholding good neighborliness.

The economic stakes behind that argument are considerable. The three-day forum has drawn 1,500 officials, business leaders, investors and representatives of financial institutions from across Africa, with sessions devoted to economic development and continental integration. Egypt organized the event in cooperation with the African Export-Import Bank and the African Union Development Agency, two institutions with direct leverage over the continent’s trade financing and development pipeline.

Sisi framed Africa’s private sector as the main driver of the continent’s economies, citing its contribution of more than 70% of gross domestic product. Yet he paired that strength with a structural weakness that matters to anyone weighing African market exposure: roughly 85% of transactions by the continent’s private sector are conducted with companies from outside Africa. Despite trade agreements and preferential arrangements among African countries, intra-African trade has accounted for only about 18% of the continent’s total trade in recent years, according to the Egyptian president. For investors and operators, those figures point to both an untapped regional market and barriers that preferential arrangements have so far failed to dismantle.

Meanwhile, the president placed Africa’s economic outlook in a wider global context, saying the continent aspires to “a world characterized by peace and stability, rather than being made to bear the consequences of global crises in which it was not a party but whose negative repercussions it suffers.” He cited the current energy crisis as an example, pointing to rising fuel and fertilizer prices and disruptions to supply and shipping chains as pressures landing on African countries that had no part in causing them.

The forum itself is a product of institutional backing decided at the continental level. Last February, the African Union summit in Addis Ababa approved holding the Alamein Africa Forum every two years in New Alamein, giving Egypt a recurring platform to convene African governments, financiers and business leaders around trade and integration agendas.

For market-watchers, the gathering signals Cairo’s ambition to position itself as a hub for African economic diplomacy, with the African Export-Import Bank and the African Union Development Agency lending institutional weight to the biennial format. Whether the forum translates rhetoric on stability and integration into measurable shifts in intra-African trade flows remains the open question, but the presence of 1,500 officials, investors and financial institutions in New Alamein underscores the scale of capital and policy interest now attached to the continent’s development agenda. As reported by Anadolu Ajansı, further details are available at https://aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/egyptian-president-calls-for-peaceful-solutions-to-conflicts-in-africa/4076990.